Sign Posts for the Weary Wild Soul

All my life I have struggled to contain my bitterness at the fact that my family could not afford to travel abroad. Instead, when I was six we had bought a cabin in the woods at Bear River Reservoir. Cabins are an ongoing financial responsibility. Like any house, you have to pay electric, water, and phone bills. The trips to and from the cabin add up, not to mention the accompanying “toys:” quads, motorcycles, and snowmobiles. I’ve had my share of fun vacations. They just didn’t provide me with sophisticated memories to allude to such as, “Oh the sea food of the French Riviera is unmatched anywhere else in the world.”

So, ever since I was about 11 any time someone I knew talked about an exciting, out-of-country vacation jealousy boiled up in my breast, and though I tried to hide it I’m sure it was easy for others to perceive.

The issue resurfaced recently when a friend of mine was talking about her application to NYU. I have always said I wanted to go to a school close to home because I am so close to my family. She said, “that’s one thing I can’t understand about you. How you can want to just stay in one place.”

I can’t remember what response I managed to get out but inside, I was irate. How could she think I don’t want to travel? There are many reasons I don’t want to go to school out of state, or even as far away as southern California. I don’t want to be far away if something should happen to a loved one. I can’t afford out-of-state tuition. And my parents don’t up and pay for me to go to Argentina like hers did. But why would that make her think I’m not interested in travel?

I realized that my intense feelings on the subject are way out of balance. There are thousands, maybe millions, of people on this planet who have lived out their entire lives in a desert. I am blessed to have been born in a state with beautiful forests, beautiful oceans, beautiful deserts, and beautiful mountains. In fact, Pulitzer Prize-Winner author and world traveller Eugene O’Neill decided to build his “final home and harbour” in the Las Trampas Wilderness that overlooks Danville. To him, it was the most beautiful place in the world.

Reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth is helping me see this issue in a different light. In the beginning of the book he talks about identity. I realized that part of the reason I was so damned angry I hadn’t traveled wasn’t simply because I wanted to go to France, or I wanted to go to Africa. My anger was tied up in my identity and the fact that I want to be the kind of person who has been to those places. I want memories in foreign countries to casually reference so that others will think I am cultured. Realizing this took a lot of the hot air out of my angry balloon. How silly it seems when you see it for what it is. My anger at others experiences was rooted in my insecurity that I didn’t have any such stories of my own to tell. But, I have lots of memories as a child getting to play in a forest that I knew like the back of my hand and how many people can say that? So we’re all different. Our paths are different. Our experiences are different.

You can travel the world hoping that doing so will make you happy. But to stick to your roots, to make peace with and bring joy to your family, to love the town you grew up in, and most of all to accept your own personal path is to move toward happiness. I’m trying to accept that up until this point in my life, I haven’t gotten to do much traveling. I want to enjoy right now, not scrimp and save years for a one month vacation. I want to honor and appreciate the experiences that others in my life have had around the world instead of envy them to the point that I can’t even listen.

In a few weeks I’m going on a cruise to Alaska with my Grandpa. I have always wanted to go to Alaska because wolves have always been my favorite animal. Though I know my chances of seeing a wolf on this cruise (that is not a piece of taxonomy) is about .00000001% I am still thrilled to be going. Working through this has helped me come to that place because before I was thinking, “Why couldn’t it be a cruise to ______?” Why just Alaska? I let my ego’s whiny frame of mind get in the way of the excitement that I GET TO GO TO ALASKA!

Love, peace, and blessings,
Katie